While live recording has migrated to solid state (Panasonic P2, Sony SR MASTER or XDCAM-EX), optical disc (Sony's XDCAM) and hard disks, the high cost of solid state and the limited shelf life of hard-disk drives make them less desirable for archival use, for which tape is still used. News and production camera crews in 2013 still have cameras that use tape formats, even in HD.

Scott, can you possibly tell me the average shelf life of an Enterprise-class hard drive? How about the average shelf life of an SSD?

Scott

Post subject: Re: Shelf life of HDDs and SSDs

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2016 1:21 pm

Site Admin

Joined: Sun Feb 04, 2007 11:44 amPosts: 6122

I would rate the shelf life just about the same as the usable life. According to information published by Backblaze drives have a median lifespan of over 6 years, which means in that time about half will fail. Past that point you have a greater chance of failure than survival. According to a study by Google SSDs seem to last longer but they also have reliability problems that increase with age. Scott.

Maxirad

Post subject: Re: Shelf life of HDDs and SSDs

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2016 4:20 pm

Joined: Sat May 08, 2010 4:13 pmPosts: 1061

Scott, is it a good idea to replace hard drives every six years even if they are Enterprise-class drives and even if they are not hooked up to a system most of the time?

Scott

Post subject: Re: Shelf life of HDDs and SSDs

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2016 11:35 pm

Site Admin

Joined: Sun Feb 04, 2007 11:44 amPosts: 6122

Not necessarily. If the drives are not in a mission critical system and especially if you have multiple backups of all the data then I generally continue to use them. I treat all drives as if they will fail at any moment. Scott.

Maxirad

Post subject: Re: Shelf life of HDDs and SSDs

Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2017 9:19 pm

Joined: Sat May 08, 2010 4:13 pmPosts: 1061

In this YouTube video, Christopher Barnatt discusses the life expectancy of SSDs. He supports SSDs, but urges that valued data be saved to no less than two drives.

I thought I might post this here. I wrote to Perfect Disk, which is a disk defragmenting software about SSD defrag. Anyway here is the response I got about it,

Thanks for contacting support.

While SSD drives certainly provide a performance improvement over traditional electro-mechanical HDD drives, SSD drives also have some deficiencies – including slow erase/write speeds and life span concerns. While file fragmentation typically doesn’t affect SSD drive performance as it does for a traditional HDD drive, free space fragmentation results in slow writes and reduced life span for SSD drives.

Some notable points from this article – which was written by Apacer, a company that produces industrial SSD solutions:

"Since the erase/write speed is slow compared to read, a write multiplication due to free space fragmentation can slow down I/O time severely."

To write a sector, the SSD controller needs to read and merge the data, then erase and write back a data block, which is bigger than a sector, called an "erase block." The size of the sector is 1 - 4MB, which is much bigger than the sector size. By consolidating free space, the process of transferring data between erase blocks can be reduced or eliminated.

"This means a well-designed defrag algorithm can extend an SSD’s life span."

For SSD drives, PerfectDisk provides a solution to maintain write speed and improve life span. PerfectDisk’s special SSD Optimization pass does as the article recommends – “devise a defrag strategy that will improve throughput while at the same time not incurring too many erase counts.“ It does this by specifically consolidating free space without attempting to defragment files and consolidating free space in a manner that reduces erase counts. SSD Optimize is included as a standard feature in all editions of PerfectDisk.

Susie

Any thoughts on that Scott?

Scott

Post subject: Re: Shelf life of HDDs and SSDs

Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 8:40 pm

Site Admin

Joined: Sun Feb 04, 2007 11:44 amPosts: 6122

On an SSD the optimization of block storage is handled internally by a properly designed drive controller doing garbage collection along with TRIM command functionality. There is no benefit to defragging a modern SSD that is periodically TRIMed, in fact the additional writes will slightly shorten the life of the cells. In short I do not recommend any such software for SSDs: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/ ... r-ssd.html

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